“Give me a hand!” he shouted at Ok-Hwa. “We need to make it look like he stumbled onto a burglary!”
Ok-Hwa quickly joined in, helping himself to Yong-Im’s wallet as well as his watch and jewelry.
“What do we do then?”
“We stick to the plan,” Hong told him. “We’ll go to Nevada and track down the next member of the team.”
CHAPTER SIX
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
Hal Brognola rarely returned from his White House briefings in a state of good cheer, and this day was no exception. As he disembarked from the helicopter that had brought him from the capital to Stony Man Farm, a clandestine base of operations in the heart of Shenandoah Valley, he trudged wearily past the sun-drenched fruit orchards to the inconspicuous-looking farm house.
As he headed toward the tunnel to the Annex, Brognola ran into Barbara Price, the Farm’s blond-haired mission controller. Price was carrying a file folder filled with intelligence briefs on the North Korea situation.
“I just spoke to Mack and Cowboy,” she told Brognola as she took a seat alongside him in the small electric rail car waiting for them at the mouth of a thousand-foot-long underground tunnel connecting the main house with the Annex. “They knocked out that street gang in L.A., but it turns out drug-running was just the tip of the iceberg as far as what they were up to.”
The rail car purred to life and slowly carried them along the subterranean passage that ran beneath the orchards as well as a stretch of land that had been converted into a poplar grove, the better to sell the Annex’s supposed function as a timber mill. Along the way, Price briefed Brognola on Bolan’s discovery of an apparent hit list involving North Korea’s former Project Kanggye nuclear team.
As he listened, Brognola fumbled through his suitcoat for a cigar. He wasn’t about to light up; he’d cut back on his smoking in recent years and for the most part contented himself to fidgeting with cigars the same way some people used worry beads.
“I’ve got Carmen checking the status of the defectors,” Price concluded, referring to Carmen Delahunt, one of Aaron Kurtzman’s cyber experts. “She should have an update ready for us.”
“Good,” Brognola replied. “If you ask me, though, I’m not sure we’re talking about a hit list, per se.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think these defectors are more valuable to North Korea alive than dead,” Brognola said. “Especially with this whole missile situation going on over there.”
“You have a point,” Price conceded. “What’s the latest on that?”
As succinctly as possible, Brognola rehashed the key points brought up during the White House briefing. For the past three years, the so-called People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea had been using its unchecked nuclear weapons development as a bargaining chip in its demands for economic aid and other concessions from the U.S. and her allies. The ploy had had intermittent success, but each time America had given an inch, DRNK had turned around and asked for a mile, then used balking by the West as an excuse to resume its nuclear agenda. When matters had escalated in recent months, Russia, China and Japan—prompted by concerns about their close geographic proximity to North Korea—had been forced off the sidelines and into the fray. There had been hope that pressure from their closer neighbors would make Kim Jong-il’s regime more willing to make compromises, but the opposite had been the case.
In recent weeks DRNK’s demands had escalated to the point of absurdity. The President was concerned by the sudden change in tact, as it seemed to indicate that the rogue nation now less concerned with negotiation than pursuing its agenda by more aggressive means. The implication seemed clear: North Korea had stalled long enough on the diplomatic front to beef up its nuclear arsenal and was now looking for a pretext to use it. And if all available intel was correct, the range of the DRNK’s missiles was no longer restricted to countries that lay adjacent to North Korea. Word was that the Korean People’s Army now had four-stage ICBMs capable of reaching American targets in a two-thousand-mile-wide swath extending from San Diego to the Great Lakes. And, much as the U.S. had always been concerned about the vulnerability of its troops stationed below the 38th parallel, now a goodly share of the homeland citizenry was lined up in Kim Jong-il’s crosshairs, as well.
Whether North Korea would be foolhardy enough to launch a first-strike attack on the U.S.—thereby ensuring their doom via retaliatory bombing—was still a matter of debate, but the President, for one, wasn’t about to play wait-and-see. At the end of the briefing, his orders had been concise and to the point: find the ICBMs and put them out of commission.